becoming

As election time looms ever nearer, my daughter becomes increasingly interested. Of course, she is studying politics in school at present. They have a three day trip to Canberra soon and just happen to be lucky to be studying this topic in the middle of an election campiagn. 

For her assignment this week she had to find three people of voting age, pose five political questions to each of them and write a summary of  their answers. She asked me to fill out her survey, then approached her Dad. (I started laughing when she handed him the paper and he looked at her blankly….he’s politically apathetic and probably won’t make his vote count by voting for Darth Vader or Goofy. – you can’t see it but right now I am rolling my eyes with frustration)

She asked our neighbours. The elderly lady on our right and the single Dad on our left. She ended up with a pretty good cross section. A retired widowed woman in her 60’s, a sinlge Dad of a teenaged son in his 40’s and a married woman with young children in her 30’s.

(She was not permitted to ask us who we were voting for, I told her I wouldn’t tell her anyway.) But she did note a common theme. We all stated health, education and aged care as our three primary issues. Along with the drought.  (My single Dad neighbour had the best answers in regaurds to the drought. I wish I could vote for him!)

It was around this age that I really became politically aware. I wrote letters to Bob Hawke (the Prime Minister when I was 11) protesting the mining of uranium that we were selling to the French who were testing their nuclear weapons in the pacific. Seemed kinda dumb to me to be giving them the very thing they needed to practise blowing us up.  I may have been young and saw things a little more black and white and not fully understood the concepts but that really isn’t important, what was important was that I was interested and passionate about poilitics and how it shaped my world.

 My mother encouraged my interest. She would give me articles from The Bulliten and Time and National Geographic that she thought where both interesting and educational. We talked politics at the dining room table. My mother is extremely liberal minded. I am much more conservative.  we had many debates and despite our seemingly opposing views, we often felt the same way about certain topics.

I don’t wish to mould my daughters politics, but I do wish to give her the foundations for making informed decisions, so that hopefully when she is required to vote, she will make her vote count.

I get frustrated and angry with voters who don’t care and don’t vote properly, for they tend to be the ones who complain the loudest about what the government is doing wrong or how hard they have it now X is in power.  And when you ask them about voting they tell you they got their name marked off and didn’t actually vote, or they just ticked/numbered random boxes.  Makes me want to punch people. I’m not sure i like mandatory voting.  I think they should have a stick at the door, ”if you are this dumb, please move into the next line for your colouring page.”